I first encountered Tai Chi when I was 12 years old. I had just started Ju Jitsu classes and my father had started this thing called Tai Chi; it looked very slow, and a bit pointless compared to the martial impact my Ju Jitsu could have. We both continued with our classes and by 15 years old I had won bronze in a national, under-18’s martial arts competition. I would play-fight with my father, as teenagers will do, and it wasn’t too difficult for me to win at that point, but as time went by I noticed it becoming trickier. By 16 I wouldn’t win every time. By 17 I won less than half the time. By 18 I could no longer even push my father off balance, and by 19 I decided I was practicing the wrong stuff!

My father was not a big, strong man, neither was he fast. In fact, he used to beat me whilst still moving slowly, and I often felt like a wet towel that he had complete control of once we came into contact. I began attending the same classes as him and within the first month I felt more strength and power than I had in all my years of Ju Jitsu. Not only that, but it was a different kind of strength and power, it wasn’t about having tight muscles, or spending hours at the gym, it didn’t require any real effort even. It was a strength that came from relaxation; a strength that is already present within your body and always has been. I no longer train in martial arts and my Tai Chi practice is based in health and relaxation, it is that path of Tai Chi that I feel I can benefit most from, and I hope others will too.

I have practiced tai chi regularly since I was 19 (over 20 years ago now) and I qualified as a Tai Chi and Qigong teacher in 2013. In order to gain my instructor qualification I went on a month-long retreat with the Lineage Grand Master, Bruce Frantzis, and trained at least 8 hours a day in order to be prepared to pass the exam. It was an amazing experience and I felt as though I learnt as much in that one month as I had in the entire previous two or three years. I am also a certified instructor with the Tai Chi Union of Great Britain. Since first taking up Tai Chi I have never looked back, I really believe that the internal energy arts are the next step in human evolution and that if we all practiced every day, we as a species would be very different.

I created The Tai Chi Effect to try and help spread the knowledge and experience I have and to help others to find and feel the chi within themselves. My father is now nearing 70 and he can still easily beat me up! I keep hoping that one of these years I’ll catch him up, but every year that I improve, he seems to get stronger and more relaxed. The benefits of starting 7 years earlier!

In 2024 I spent a month training intensively with Mark Rasmus on his Instructor Training for Elastic Force Qigong and Hermetics. It has been an absolutely transformative time, and completely revolutionised my understanding of how far these arts can go. My own skills and understanding of these beautiful movement arts has taken a whole new leap forward, and I’m excited to be able to share these with my students.

Below is a picture of me at the start of my journey, and one from 2018.